There was a time, not so long ago, when collecting comics, playing Dungeons & Dragons in the neighbor’s room or staying locked at home programming a game on Commodore 64 did not make you the king of the school. Calling someone a geek was considered an insult more than anything else, and caricatures of the genre left no one wondering.
Twenty years later, the panorama has been reversed. The geek has become one of the cultural pivots of the 21ste century, and the entire industry began to speak its language. It must be said that the models of geek success have multiplied: from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, via Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos, many modern billionaires have built their empire on an increasingly mainstream geek culture. But how did we get there?
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Of Dungeons & Dragons à Avengers
In 2001, two franchises based on literary works arrived simultaneously in cinema: Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Chris Columbus. The first comes from a cult book among fantasy lovers, long considered a kind of second rate. The second is the adaptation of a best-seller reserved for young people. Both explode the counters and establish the idea that a complex imaginary universe can generate monumental revenues, provided it is taken seriously.
The second step was taken in 2008 with the release ofIron Manthe first film in what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No one is betting on Robert Downey Jr. in an armor or on the studio’s ability to build a universe spanning nearly 20 years. However, the bet pays off beyond all expectations. In 2019, Avengers : Endgame reaps $2.79 billion at the worldwide box officebecoming, at the time, the highest-grossing film in history. The franchise as a whole has since accumulated over $32 billion in revenue. Superheroes, long confined to the second-hand comic book section, are dictating cinema news.
The third step is that of video games, with a scale which still far exceeds the previous one. In France, the sector achieved 5.7 billion euros in turnover in 2024, after a peak at 6.1 billion in 2023. The genre has long been shunned by the general public, it is still regularly accused of all evils by certain elected officials, starting with the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron. However, it is the country’s leading cultural industry, ahead of cinema, music and books combined. On a global scale, the industry is worth more than 180 billion dollars, and the average age of the player in France is today 40 years old. It is no longer a question of an adolescent practice, but of a cultural phenomenon in its own right.
The triumph of marketing
Behind the numbers, there is an industrial recovery mechanism of formidable efficiency. Brands have perfectly understood that geek culture has an asset that other entertainment industries envy: a passionate, engaged, collecting audience, ready to spend lavishly on what they love.
Geek culture has become the waking dream of modern marketing, and all cultural industries have begun to imitate its mechanisms: extended universes, multiverses, easter eggs, conventions, infinite derivative products, collector’s editions… culture has no limits, especially when it is profitable.
Mainstream, but not yet inclusive
Geek culture, when it moved from marginal to dominant status, brought with it traditions of exclusion that it has never completely abandoned. Developed by men and for men, the world of gaming, role-playing and imagination have long excluded minorities, taking care to avoid overly varied representations, and establishing a toxic culture of who stands out from the crowd.
Today, women now represent half of the players, and the inclusion is felt both in the possibilities offered for character customization and in the narrative angles chosen. If sexism and racism continue to infuse certain communities, Geek culture has become a refuge for many formerly disenfranchised people.
The geek has won the culture war. Mainstream recovery has given him unprecedented visibility, colossal resources and social recognition unthinkable thirty years ago. In return, it transformed what was a counterculture into an industry like any other, with its logic of profit, its excesses and its oversights. Revenge of the Nerd is now publicly traded, and it’s not about to slow down.
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